Impact of Wireless IEEE802.11n Encryption Methods on Network Performance of Operating Systems

Wireless technologies continue to play an increasing role in all kinds of networks. Wireless options are increasing and the cost of these technologies continues to decrease. It is anticipated that wireless networking of all types will become more prevalent in the years to come. However security and performance is a major concern. In this research, performance of wireless IEEE802.11n is evaluated on four operating systems, namely Windows XP, Vista, Server 2008 and Ubuntu. A network is created on a test-bed and performance related metrics is tested for both TCP and UDP protocols. Wireless security encryption methods (WEP-64, WEP-128, WPA and WPA2) are implemented on the operating systems to evaluate their network performance. This study shows that performance of wireless is operating system dependant, and various encryption methods impact performance significantly: throughput values decrease with some encryption methods, jitter and drop rates differ. It is also seen that WPA2 behaves significantly different to the other encryption methods.